Dr. Zachary McKinley

The work this site extends

Dr. Zachary Paul McKinley earned the Doctor of Business Administration degree from Liberty University’s Graduate School of Business. His dissertation, submitted in 2022 and published in the university’s Scholars Crossing repository, is titled Adapting North American Selling Methods to Cross-Cultural Technology Sales Engagements in the Borderless Global Economy. The project was chaired by Christopher Bellamy.

The study used a phenomenological design. McKinley analyzed interviews and qualitative questionnaire responses from twelve highly tenured North American technology salespeople, looking for patterned cultural interactions and for the selling behaviors those people actually practiced with foreign buyers.

The selling behaviors he observed, in order of prevalence, were Communicating, Connecting, Consulting, Quarterbacking, Serving, Solving, Structuring, Teaching, and Understanding. The cultural mismatches that showed up most often were Direct versus Indirect communication, Assertiveness, Power Distance, and Universalism. Moderate interactions involved Specific versus Diffuse work-life boundaries, Sequential versus Synchronous views of time, and Collectivism. From those findings he proposed a framework for adapting North American selling methods so they fit non-US buyers more carefully.

Those results are the spine of this site. NorAm Culture exists to make them usable: for a US seller who is losing deals they cannot explain, and for a foreign team that is misreading American directness, speed, or contract habits.

Why he is positioned here as a foremost expert

Plenty of writers offer etiquette lists about “doing business in America.” Fewer have produced original doctoral research on the precise problem of North American selling methods meeting non-US buyers, and then kept living the comparison in public. McKinley does both. He is a United States-born researcher who chose to live in Argentina, and he continues to study, teach, and explain US culture from that doubled vantage point. This site is the comprehensive, multilingual home for that expertise.

The claim is not that no one else has written about Hofstede, Hall, or GLOBE. The claim is that few people have joined those maps to a primary study of North American enterprise selling and to a sustained practice of helping people adapt in both directions.

How he works with culture

Culture here is treated as a set of learned defaults—not a score that describes your neighbor, and not a contest about which country is better. National averages hide regions, industries, immigrant communities, and individual temperament. McKinley’s own public research notes, published on soyzachary.com, are careful about this: models disagree, older Hofstede figures differ from later updates by The Culture Factor, and a lived story can illustrate a pattern without pretending to prove it.

That same discipline applies on this site. Figures on this site come from public sources. Findings from McKinley (2022) are cited as such, as are those that belong to Hofstede, to House and the GLOBE team, or to Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner.

A note on the person

McKinley lives in Buenos Aires and also writes and records, in Spanish and English, about everyday cultural difference. Those stories belong on soyzachary.com. This site is the complementary project: the structured guide, the two professional tracks, and a consulting door for organizations that need the research applied to a real market, a real sales team, or a real entry into the United States.

To start that conversation, use the consulting form.

Need this applied to your organization? Zachary advises international companies, sales teams, and trade groups entering the US market—and US companies expanding abroad—through sales-team training, US market-entry advisory, executive briefings, and workshops or speaking. Start the conversation